These Aquatic ‘Superplants’ Are Used To Feed Cows And Lower Deadly Emissions

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There is a new innovative cattle feed startup company that could lessen emissions that come from livestock in a number of ways, and it uses a water-born crop that grows at extremely quick speed.

By lessening the methane emissions from the bovine’s digestion, using the farm’s manure to cover input costs, growing the plants on lots smaller than the traditional feed, this new aquatic feed provides protection to the invaluable beef industry from passionate politicians and activists who aren’t willing to wait for new ways to improve the carbon footprint brought on by livestock.

The startup, which is called Fyto, speaks of a “library” of aquatic crop varieties that propose the use of superior nutrition compared to other types of feed, such as alfalfa.


The same family of a common pond vegetation, known as duckweed, are grown in and installed in greenhouses throughout the farm. While duckweed consumes way less amounts of water than terrestrial crops – despite being grown in a bed of water – the duckweed can actually double in size every three days, making it one of the fastest growing speeds for any type of crop used for any purpose, aside from certain bamboo species.

Moreover, the greenhouses’ speed and efficiency is reported to be able to support large herds of beef and dairy cattle on way less lang than herds from Brazil require, where normally tons of forests are cleared for soybean plantation needed to feed the cattle.

Like many other concerns in agriculture, cattle ranching is also about the input of a number of costs, such as land, feed, manure management, and antibiotics. In fact, there’s tons that goes into it, unless the cattle are pastured on public land such as National Forest areas. Meanwhile, some pilot projects that are now using Fyto have already cut a number of input costs by half, in such aspects as water and manure management.


In addition, the plants also reproduce “vegetatively,” which means that they don’t require seeds to grow. How it works is the female plant just sprouts the next generations, kind of like a second limb. And best thing of all, founder and CEO of Fyto, Jason Prapas, shares that it’s cheap.

In a report with Fast Company, Prapas said, “This won’t have any impact if it can’t be cost competitive with what people need to feed their animals.”

Fast Company

“So that’s been key from the first notebook sketches, let alone to the first production units. I’m happy to say that this actually can compete on costs with commodity products. And that’s largely owing to the plant science team helping us get yields that are really an order of magnitude higher than other crops,” he added.

Prapas also said that the cows really love to eat the duckweed.

Prapas explained, “I’ve never known a cow could gallop until we started to do our pilot feedings last summer. And we saw them consistently running over to us when we brought the Fyto feed over.”

Incredibly, Fyto has just recently closed a $15 million Series A financing round, including Google as one of their investors.

 

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